Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (16 page)

This is how the Islamic Republic survives, and how its citizens survive in it. Inside coexists with outside. Private with public. Freedom with restrictions. The Islamic Republic can be left at the door—up to a point.

Iranians can adhere to perfect Islamic codes of behavior on the outside and yet behave much differently when the doors are locked and the drapes are drawn. But it isn’t quite so simple in practice. The limits of behavior are complicated because the rules are often nonexistent or changing or left open to interpretation. Iranians can therefore live in violation of what they think the rules say and get away with it most of the time. But they have to be prepared to pay the price when the state suddenly decides not to look the other way. So there are intrusions, and there is no pattern to them.

As a reporter, and as a visitor, I find myself fascinated and confused by the distinction between public and private life that Iranians have learned to make. Sometimes, even today, I can’t keep the two straight. For me, private space can mean any space where I can take off my head scarf and relax, but even that is not a precise definition. Given the constant fear of intrusion, I have been amazed to see how people manage to lead what has looked to me like normal lives behind closed doors, even though their behavior clearly violates the moral standards set by the state. Watching the way Iranians cross back and forth between private and public behavior has made it even harder for me to figure out where the lines are. Over the years, I have tried to define a number of spaces that offer varying degrees of protection and escape. But it isn’t easy.

Take, for example, the time friends invited me to tag along to a wedding reception in a large villa with a swimming pool and a beautifully landscaped garden. There were two hundred guests and mountains of food. Vodka, wine, and beer were being served in silver pitchers placed haphazardly on end tables, both to conceal the fact that they contained alcohol and to make it easier to dump the contents into the rosebushes should the morals police show up.

About ninety minutes into the party, I saw several shabbily dressed bearded men wandering among the guests. Without warning, they announced a threat to arrest everyone for immorality. The women ran for their head scarves and coats. Some of them rushed a coat rack that fell on top of me. Most of the guests took their belongings and left quickly. Members of the rock band threw their instruments and then themselves over the wall to the neighbor’s garden. The remaining guests took refuge in the house.

Rumors spread quickly: the bride’s father hadn’t paid enough in advance to the Komiteh, the neighborhood morals police, to ensure that the party would be undisturbed; the music was too loud and had attracted attention. The father argued with the intruders. He persuaded them to take him to jail but to leave the guests alone and let the party continue. He would later be put on trial and forced to pay a stiff fine.

At first, the bridal couple sat dazed on their thronelike chairs. They seemed not to notice that their guests were leaving and that the mountains of food were left untouched. Then suddenly, the bride and groom disappeared as well. The story spread that they were too hurt and humiliated to say goodbye to their guests. But the groom’s younger brother was unfazed. A party was a party. After the Komiteh left, he persuaded the band to come back. He and about a dozen friends danced throughout the night.

Anyone can feel the tension between publicly banned and privately allowable behavior in this story. But to try to draw a coherent lesson about where that line is—what is permitted and what will be punished—is to invite frustration.

The roots of the distinction between the public and private are found in both Iranian and Islamic culture, in which inner spaces of human privacy and choice are supposed to be inviolable. The Koran clearly states, “There is no compulsion in matters of faith.” The sanctity of private space also builds on something even older: the home. As in many societies, the Iranian home is supposed to be a sanctuary immune from intruders. But historically there is more: an Iranian home had two parts, exterior public rooms that were furnished simply and belonged to the men, and interior private rooms that were decorated with the good carpets and ornaments and belonged to the women. Men had a role in public; women ran the private space. This division of labor coincided with the idea that women were to be enjoyed by their men only in private, and that public life was for men. So the women needed a sphere of life to operate and control.

Even today, Iranian social life is rooted in the family and the home. In fact, it is more so now than before the revolution, because so much of what used to be considered normal social intercourse is forbidden in public. Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, is also a day to visit family members—at home. Unlike most places in the Middle East, where men go out with one another on weekend nights, men in Iran are expected to take out their families. Nazila and I were once driving along a main street in Shiraz at about 11:00
P.M.
When we saw hundreds of families picnicking—in parks, in squares, on the median strips—I asked Nazila what the occasion was. “It’s Thursday night, of course!” she said. Of course. Thursday is the equivalent of Saturday in the West.

For many Iranians, family ties, which have always been strong, unraveled after the revolution as breadwinners were forced to emigrate to distant places in search of work. But for others, family ties became stronger, as parents and grown children were forced by economic circumstances to live in the same apartment, or at least nearby, in order to pool resources and share chores. There is a political side to this too. People who were considered enemies or even suspect by the revolution took refuge not with friends but with family.

In principle, the Islamic Republic observes the sanctity of the home. Article 22 of the Constitution clearly protects the “reputation, life, rights, homes, and jobs” of individuals from outside invasion. Ayatollah Khomeini reminded government employees of this dictum early in the revolution. “If you by mistake and error enter a personal house or personal place of work of somebody, and there you are faced with weapons or tools of corruption or other deviant material such as drugs, you do not have the right to disclose this information to others,” he said. “And you do not have the right to arrest or beat the house residents and owner, for this is going beyond God’s bounds.”

But actual practice is a different matter. The home is protected from outside invasion under the Constitution only if laws are not broken. The Islamic Republic routinely violates private spaces if there are suspicions of drinking, dancing, or gatherings of unrelated men and women. Much of this intrusiveness stems less from Islamic purity than from greed: the low-level police and self-appointed cultural vigilantes who patrol the streets and knock on doors usually are willing to resolve the matter with a payoff rather than an arrest.

That makes the intrusions into private space all the more shocking, because they suggest that the Islamic Republic and people operating in its name do not take the rules they have written seriously. And that is why, in July 1999, there was universal condemnation of vigilantes and security police who invaded a University of Tehran dormitory and beat up students, demolished property, and stole the students’ possessions after the students began protests against censorship. Still, even if the clerics disapprove of the vigilantes’ behavior, they don’t punish it severely, and that allows it to continue.

One of the unexpected beneficiaries of the restrictions on public behavior is the takeout restaurant. Something as simple as going on a date to a movie or a public park can be risky. So many people just stay home at night. Those who can afford it order takeout and watch pirated videos of American films or foreign television programs beamed in on illegal satellite dishes.

Billing and cooing isn’t the only thing Iranians feel free to do in the privacy of their homes. The home protects those who give the outward appearance of being part of the Islamic system, but behave differently—some would say hypocritically—indoors. A friend who lives in an apartment has a bearded neighbor who works for the government and whose family is extremely religious. The apartment had been confiscated years before from one of the Shah’s bureaucrats and was given rent-free to the new tenants, presumably because of their piety. Yet the husband can be heard late at night cursing Khomeini. The family plays the banned music of Googoosh, a wildly popular Iranian female singer at the time of the Shah. The daughter takes piano lessons. And the family has never returned the videos of American movies it borrowed from my friend.

In all this talk of refuges from the intrusiveness of the morals police, I should make one thing clear: one of the reasons Iranians still manage to do what their government doesn’t want them to do in their private lives has to do with the nature of the government itself. When it comes to using the citizenry to inform on its neighbors, Iran is not like the former Soviet Union or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Mao’s China. Certainly, the Islamic state has tried to stamp out moral infractions and has employed cadres of vigilantes. But the Islamic Republic is not very organized or centralized. It is a collection of fiefs rather than a monolithic state. It generally has not forced its average citizens to inform on relatives and neighbors. It never developed a sophisticated system of rewards and punishments to promote reporting.

There is also something about Iranian culture that makes circumventing the government easier to condone. Culturally, Iranians don’t like to snitch. Sure, they snitch if they see an advantage to it, but centuries of dealing with authoritarian rule have contributed to a deep distrust of authority. Many Iranians observe a code of silence rather than turn in neighbors who break the rules. In the battle between a duplicitous system based on unreasonable state rules and a resourceful people intent on living the way they have always done, the people have the upper hand.

I used to think that the safest refuges in Iran were the homes of diplomats who enjoy immunity under international agreements. But the Islamic state intrudes even into these private spaces, from time to time. This is, after all, the country that seized the American embassy.

And there was the Gust affair. In 1996 a dozen security police from the Intelligence Ministry burst into a dinner party for six prominent Iranian writers and intellectuals hosted by Jens Gust, the German embassy’s cultural and press attaché. The young diplomat was not allowed to call his embassy; the guests were interrogated and jailed for the night. The police videotaped the scene: Iranian women with their heads uncovered and bottles of alcohol that had been served. An Iranian female friend was heartsick that the government now had ammunition to use against her.

So much for diplomatic immunity.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry apologized afterward to the Germans, but that must have been cold comfort for Gust. He was reprimanded by his ambassador, then temporarily reassigned to Bonn. He never came back.

I thought of the Gust affair when, months later, I was dining at the home of a young male diplomat and he invited me and another guest to swim in the enormous pool on the property. It was a brutally hot evening, and a tempting offer. Then I wrote the headline in my head: “American Journalist Arrested for Immoral Behavior.” I thanked my host for his hospitality and left him and his friend to swim without me.

Other diplomats have been more insistent about swimming. One ambassador liked to meet his guests at the door in his swimming trunks and take them immediately to the swimming pool. It was the one place he felt he could talk openly, for he suspected that his house was bugged. But it was not long before even the pool in his private garden was compromised. A high-rise apartment building was going up nearby, and the high floors offered an unimpeded view of the pool. One day when the ambassador’s nephew invited some young Iranian friends to swim, the construction workers from the apartment building stoned them with building blocks.

Despite the intrusions, I have met many people who have transformed rooms of their private homes into creative spaces. One is Shahrzad Hajmoshir, a clothing designer, artist, and antiques dealer who was divorced in the early years of the revolution and then opened her home for business. Today, from her house on a winding dirt road in the hills north of Tehran, she collects authentic brightly colored tribal costumes that she restores and sells. If the garments are too torn to restore, she salvages the good pieces and uses them in original creations.

Hajmoshir’s home is an oasis to which I have escaped from time to time. She serves tea made from grated quince in cranberry-colored glasses as incense burns. Just about everything in her house is for sale—the samovars, the two-hundred-year-old doors, the Turkmen hats, the Qajar embroideries.

But the clothing and art businesses aren’t enough. Hajmoshir also has turned herself into a yoga instructor and gives private lessons.Yoga has given her the spiritual peace to overcome the frustrations and the limitations she endures in the Islamic Republic. Like many other women who have discovered peace in their private spaces, she has never thought seriously of leaving the country she loves. “I love being with original things and I find myself here,” she said. “If you find yourself, you can be happy where you are. Life passes. Your children grow up and leave. But I am Iranian. I love my country. Where else would I want to go?”

Hajmoshir’s one act of defiance is that she walks on her land bareheaded. I asked her if she is afraid that someone will see her. “This is my property, my space,” she told me. “No one from the outside has the right to invade it or look at me. If you feel harmony in life, everything is in balance. I’m close to the sky and the land. Why should I be afraid?”

Unafraid and innovative are perhaps the best ways to describe how Iranians—particularly women—have expanded the meaning of home. Another such woman is the beautiful blond singer Pari Zangeneh, who has turned her home into an auditorium. Zangeneh was one of the most popular folksingers in Iran before the revolution. She hid behind big sunglasses, having lost her sight in a car accident. Nowadays, if she can’t perform unveiled in public spaces or in mixed company, why not do it for women in her living room?